


results, not causes

by cheloniidae



Category: BioShock 1 & 2 (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:08:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23447512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheloniidae/pseuds/cheloniidae
Summary: A woman is lying dead in the street, and Diane McClintock isn’t angry anymore.The unfaded teal of her plainest dress sticks out amidst the muted tones and torn fabrics of Apollo Square, but for all the curious-fearful-angry looks she draws, no one so much as glances at the corpse in front of her. People walk past the charred body like it’s just another piece of trash littering the Square: a newspaper, a Pep Bar wrapper. Not one of their own who fell, screaming and burning, from the top of the fence.Or: Diane doesn't need a pretty face to fight in the war.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	results, not causes

**Author's Note:**

> Heavily edited repost of an old fic from the long-ago year of 2015.

A woman is lying dead in the street, and Diane McClintock isn’t angry anymore.

The unfaded teal of her plainest dress sticks out amidst the muted tones and torn fabrics of Apollo Square, but for all the curious-fearful-angry looks she draws, no one so much as glances at the corpse in front of her. People walk past the charred body like it’s just another piece of trash littering the Square: a newspaper, a Pep Bar wrapper. Not one of their own who fell, screaming and burning, from the top of the fence.

The screaming stopped when the woman hit the ground. The burning took longer.

Inside the security booth, the guard who started the fire — the same one Diane bribed to get past the gate — sips placidly at his coffee. His eyes never leave the fence. If the smell of burning flesh makes him want to vomit, like it does Diane, he gives no sign of it. The guard must be used to this, she thinks. He’s Ryan’s guard, acting on Ryan’s orders, and he’s used to burning people alive with a snap of his fingers.

And the people of Apollo Square walk by the corpse, heads down, like they’re used to this happening. Like the woman was dead before the guard snapped his fingers. Like living here is just a death that hasn’t happened yet.

The fury that drove Diane here — that carried her feet away from Fort Frolic, that spurred her on through Rapture’s glass-and-aluminum halls, that gave her the courage to bribe the guard — that fury deserts her. Her knees give out; her dry-cleaned dress pools around her, soaking up puddles of brackish-brown leak water. She needs to hate these people like a splicer needs his next hit of ADAM. Everywhere, everywhere, she sees the same words spray-painted in red: _Atlas lives_. It’s what they shouted over gunfire when they set off the bomb; it’s what rang in Diane’s ears as she cried and bled and asked God why her, why her, why her. They ruined Rapture that night. Ruined _her_. Ryan can’t even look at her now, can’t look at scars that will never, never fade. It’s their fault they’re behind the gate. They’re thieves and bandits and terrorists and parasites and—

And a woman is lying dead in the street, and the smell of desperation hangs thicker than smoke, and Diane can’t make herself believe this is right.

* * *

Diane wanders the Square, searching for something that will let her make sense of what she saw at the gate, and wherever she goes, she finds the same poster. A strong-jawed man in suspenders, hands on his hips and head raised in unbroken defiance, gazes into a better future only he can see. Below him, block letters ask a question Diane doesn’t know the answer to.

_WHO IS ATLAS?_

The name makes her throat tighten, knots her stomach with well-remembered fear. The terrorists didn’t just shout his name when they attacked; they planted their bomb inside the Kashmir’s statue of the world-bearing titan. A piece of him sliced clean through Diane’s cheek, splitting the right side of her face from lip to ear, leaving a scar that even Dr. Steinman couldn’t fix. To her, Atlas is the sound of screams and the thunder of stampeding feet and the taste of blood in her mouth. But to the people of Apollo square, he’s something more. Something important.

She has to know why.

Bit by bit, people tell her. Atlas is the one who keeps them going as Ryan’s heel grinds down on them. Atlas gives the starving a crust of bread and a dream to fight for. When Ryan’s men drag away people’s daughters, Atlas gives them a reason not to drown themselves in an airlock.

“Their daughters?” asks Diane, when she hears the last part. “What are you talking about?”

The woman Diane’s speaking to folds her arms. “Have you been living under a rock?”

“A hospital. What do you mean, Ryan’s taking people’s daughters? That can’t—” Diane stops herself from finishing the sentence. _That can’t be true,_ she wants to say, but after everything she’s seen since the gate, all she knows is that she never truly knew Andrew Ryan. If he’s capable of Apollo Square, he’s capable of anything.

“You see any girl-children around here?” asks the woman. “No. Ryan took them all to make Little Sisters. His scientists… twisted them. They ain’t children anymore. Ain’t even human. The kindest thing we can do for them now is put them out of their misery.”

The ground sways under Diane’s feet. When Ryan convinced her to leave the sun behind, he told her their new home would be a place where the government wouldn’t tear families apart. No war, no draft, no empty-casket funerals for men who were buried in a battlefield graveyard a thousand miles and a continent away. The Rapture Central Council wouldn’t rip apart families the way Uncle Sam did Diane’s. Ryan promised, and Diane believed.

For fifteen long years, Diane believed.

Near Hestia Chambers, the scent of cod soup mingles with the scent of brine. Diane watches from a distance as an old woman with numbers tattooed on her arm ladles broth into bowls and sharp-edged cups. A young boy, ten at the oldest, stands near the front of the line, shivering in the cold air. Ryan’s men take the girls, but the fate the boys are left to isn't much kinder. This boy’s clothes are barely more than rags; his bones show through his skin, sickly and sallow. Diane can’t bear to look at him for more than a moment.

Charity chips away at very foundation of Rapture, Ryan says. He’s given her that lecture in private dozens of times; he’s given the speech in public even more. His laws, Rapture’s laws, say that this child should starve. It isn’t the market’s responsibility if a child can’t buy food at a fair price. The city owes no debt to the hungry.

The old woman sings as she ladles soup into the child’s cup, low and sweet and somehow, despite everything, with a spirit that isn’t crushed. “Atlas got a secret; you ain’t in this alone…”

God and Rapture have abandoned the people of Apollo Square, but a titan hasn’t.

* * *

This is what the constables find missing from Diane McClintock’s apartment: her warmest clothing, the most expensive of her jewelry, every scrap of food from the kitchen, every last dollar, and her.

This is what they never knew was there to miss: a rosary, a single page from the book of Psalms, and a picture of two uniformed men smiling shoulder to shoulder with a not-yet-scarred woman.

This is the letter they find, written and rewritten a dozen times, addressed to a man who will rip it to shreds unopened:

_Andrew,_

_I’m leaving and I’m not coming back._

_Nobody took me. I’m choosing this on my own. It isn’t because you stood me up again, or because you let me spend a month alone in a hospital, or because of the other girls. It isn’t because you don’t have the courage to say to my face that you don’t want me anymore. I’m leaving because you were wrong._

_You were wrong when you told me there were no innocents. I saw them two days ago in Apollo Square. It’s all I can think about since then: there were children behind that wire. I tried so hard to find an excuse for you. I wanted to believe you didn’t know. I want to believe it more than anything, but I know how you keep an eye on everything that happens in Rapture. You wouldn’t miss something like that. You knew all along._

_You told me it was Atlas who was tearing Rapture apart, but you could have stopped this years ago. You could have given them a fair chance like you promised. Above the metro station, there’s a banner: “opportunity awaits.” The only opportunity these people got was to starve in a leaking slum._

_And when letting them starve wasn’t enough, you started tearing families apart! You promised me Rapture would be somewhere the government never took people’s children away from them. You lied to me. I met a woman whose daughter got taken by one of your men. When she tried to follow them, he shot her. She can’t walk anymore, but she’s still alive because her neighbors take care of her. They’re good and kind people. They might be the only ones Rapture has left._

_They opened my eyes. For fifteen years, I’ve made excuses for you. I’m finally through with it. I know better than anybody what you really are, and I know which side I’m fighting for._

_You won’t win this war. You can’t break them._

_-Diane_

* * *

There are no mirrors in the cold, cramped room Diane shares with five other women, and she dresses for the day’s work without looking at herself. Some would call that an inconvenience. Diane is grateful. Mirrors show her a face as unrecognizable to her as Rapture; every day she avoids looking into one is a small mercy.

It’s important to appreciate small mercies, Diane has learned, in a place like Apollo Square.

Another thing she’s learned about places like Apollo Square: There’s always work to be done. Too much work and too few hands to do it, which is why they didn’t turn her away when she showed up with three suitcases full of supplies and a determined gleam in her eye. She may be Andrew Ryan’s former mistress, but she has two functioning hands. She can be put to use like anyone else.

They tell her where to sleep, and they tell her where to work, and she obeys without complaint. They don’t yet trust her with the big jobs, the dangerous jobs, but the small ones are just as necessary. Cleaning, washing, cooking, repairing. Every day, she stitches torn-up clothes back together, just like her mama taught her. And when there’s none of that left to do, they teach her how to stitch torn-up people back together. Diane learns not to flinch at the sight of a bone-deep cut, learns how to steel her hands against curses and groans of pain as she takes the needle in-out, in-out.

She isn’t blind to the looks some people give her, or deaf to the whispered conversations about _Ryan’s whore_ that stop as soon as she enters a room. But she pretends to be. She keeps her head down, does her work, and knows that someday she’ll prove herself to them.

By the end of each day, there are new bloodstains on the clothes that hang off her steadily shrinking frame, and there’s blood under her fingernails, showing through cracks in blue polish. The polish chips more every day, but Diane does nothing to fix it. Nail polish is a luxury unheard of in Apollo Square. Before the week is out, she’ll have plain nails for the first time since she was fifteen, and she'll have calluses on her fingers and palms to match.

Sleep takes her the moment she touches her rock-solid mattress. Exhaustion has something to be said for it: It lets her sleep without painkillers or a glass of whiskey for the first time since New Year’s, and it fends off the nightmares more often than not. (Apollo Square gives her new nightmares to replace ones of being trampled underfoot in the chaos at the Kashmir. She dreams of women burning, of being dead-but-not and forgotten in the street, of a noose tight around her neck.)

"You’re starting to look like one of us,” says one of the women who shares Diane’s room. Tovah Landau, who carries the scent of gunpowder with her, who lost her daughter to Ryan and her son to sickness. Two weeks ago, that comment would have cut Diane deeper than a knife. Now, in the moments before she passes out from a day’s work, it puts a small smile on her lips.

The curve of her mouth tugs on the scar that cuts her lower lip in two. Even without mirrors, she can never forget.

She was was seven years old when her mama snatched a curling iron from her small fist and yelled loud enough to wake everyone in their building, _Diane Lynette McClinctock! What were you thinking? What if it left a scar?_ Now, with all her makeup sitting in a vanity in Olympus Heights, she can’t even try to hide the marks that web across her face like cracks in shattered glass. No man wants a wife with a face like that, Mama would say. She’d be right.

Diane turns the sentence over in her head: _No man will want you._ She expects it to sting like a bucketful of yellow jackets, but it doesn’t. Maybe a woman only has so much wanting-to-be-wanted in her, and Diane spent all of hers on Ryan without realizing. Maybe Apollo Square is changing her. Ever since she was a little girl learning how to put letters together, Diane’s life was laid out for her in neon signs. She would find a man to take care of her, and she would give him children, and somewhere inside that perfect little family, she would find happiness like a sun that never sets.

Apollo Square has given her something different. She doesn’t have a man, but she stitches up the soldiers who come back bleeding from the raids. She doesn’t have children, but she ladles out soup to starving boys when it’s her turn at the soup pot, and she wipes away their tears when they let her.

This isn’t the life Diane’s mama wanted for her. No doubt, if Gracie McClintock saw the state of her daughter right now, Diane would feel the back of her hand. But her mama is at rest in the ground back in Baltimore, and Diane doesn’t need a pretty face to fight this war.

* * *

Everywhere Diane goes in Apollo Square, she finds pictures of missing people. Photographs are glued to every wall, every newsstand, every surface where someone walking by might see. They ask her, _Have you seen me, have you seen me?_ Diane memorizes each new face, praying that someday soon, her answer will be yes.

She’s been behind the wire for a month and a half, and she hasn’t seen a single one. But she keeps reading the names. Keeps hoping, hoping, hoping.

Today, on one of the walls just outside Artemis Suites, there’s something other than the usual pictures. A flash of purple catches Diane’s eyes, blurry from hours spent with a needle between her fingers, and she stops and blinks to clear them. She steps closer. Blinks again in disbelief.

Bouquets of violets, tied together with pieces of wire, are pinned to the wall over the pictures.

There isn’t any way to grow them down here, she knows; the last flowers she saw were the rhododendrons she left wilting on her bedside table, half a mile and a world away. Whoever put the violets up must have smuggled them in. Must have risked being shot by the guards, or frozen, or set on fire, just to bring some sign of life into the Square.

Someone else stops to stare, a man Diane dimly recognizes from the kitchen. His eyes don’t light up like hers did. He reaches out to brush his fingers against one of the violets’ petals, and in the flickering light, his hand trembles. He doesn’t spare Diane a glance.

She can’t imagine why he isn’t happy. The flowers are proof that beauty can exist in Apollo Square. That no matter how bad things get, the people won’t be broken. She opens her mouth to comment on how beautiful they are—

And before she can get the first syllable out, he’s whispering a prayer. The foreign words are almost buried under the sounds of the Square, arguments and fire and distant gunshots, but she knows the tone. It’s how Father Kelso sounded on the day Diane wore a black dress and two bodies weren’t there to bury.

A chill of understanding runs down her spine. Her question sticks in her throat like shards of glass.

Santiago Ruiz, age thirty-two; Rebecca Pensak, age six; Donna Marsh, age fifty-seven... more pictures than Diane can count. This wall of photographs, crowded and layered on top of each other— this makeshift memorial is the closest thing those people will get to a grave. The injustice of it makes Diane’s hands clench into fists at her sides. How does everyone else keep moving forward? How can they not lose themselves to this?

And through all of it, someone risked their life to get flowers. Risked becoming one of the dead in order to honor them. The courage it took— she can’t begin to imagine.

Ryan painted a picture in her mind of Atlas’ followers as parasites: animals, all human reason lost to ADAM and spite, who could only eat away at Rapture until they devoured the city’s heart. But proof of their humanity is staring her right in the face, violet and green and alive. If she could just make Ryan see—

But she isn’t that naive anymore.

* * *

The revolution is headquartered on the top floor of Fontaine’s old poorhouse, a place that’s seen more than its fair share of misery. Some people still speak of Fontaine as a saint: He gave my family somethin’ to eat when we was starving, says one; he gave us a warm place to sleep when my Becky got that cough, says another. All of Ryan’s accusations are slander, people insist, even though half of them own holy books he smuggled down into Rapture.

But the bulk of their praise is for the man Diane is finally getting to meet.

The room is less grand than she might have expected. A desk, a table, a printing press, and a locked storeroom with never-quite-enough ammunition. In the corner, a picture of Andrew Ryan’s face is taped to the wall, pocked with holes from being used as a dartboard. Unused posters litter the floor; a dozen pairs of eyes looking towards a better future, a dozen heads raised in defiance. The answer to the question they ask is right in front of her— a man, not a titan, but Diane feels smaller than an ant as she sits across from him.

“Johnny tells me you’ve been a help t’ us,” says Atlas, in a brogue that drips working-class from every syllable. No one agrees on exactly what he did before he was Atlas, whether he worked the docks or construction or something else entirely, but they all agree on one thing: He tried doing things Ryan’s way. He tried working for an honest living, and all he got in return was the boot of poverty pressing down on his neck. “Fixed up Sam Boyle right well, you did.”

“Thank you.” She isn’t certain what she should call him; adds, “Sir,” just in case.

“No need for that.” He looks her over, appraising her. Diane tries not to fidget under his gaze. “Never thought I’d see a lass give up Olympus Heights for this damned hellhole. Ryan’s own, no less.”

“I’m not Ryan’s no more.” With Ryan she tended her words like a garden, pruning away the double negatives, the all thems, every other little thing he voiced his disapproval of. In Apollo Square, she doesn’t have to. “What he’s doing to ‘Pollo Square— it isn’t right. These people shouldn’t have to live like this. No one should. It’s not…”

“It ain’t the pretty song he told you Rapture was?”

Diane remembers an arm around her waist as Rapture first dazzled her through a bathysphere window. She remembers standing next to podiums as words built of iron-clad conviction echoed through the city’s halls. She remembers lying on a large bed in a dimly lit room, running fingers through dark hair, whispering reassurances that it would all be all right, that they would rebuild, that Rapture would stay strong as long as its founder did.

More than anything, she remembers being a fool.

“I had no idea how bad things were down here,” she says. “When I saw it myself, I… I couldn’t just do nothing about it. I want to fight for these people. That’s what you’re planning, isn’t it? Leading them in some kind of uprising. Liberating them from this… this place.”

Atlas sighs. For a moment he looks like the titan he took his name from, a world-sized burden on his shoulders. For the people of Apollo Square to keep fighting, someone has to bear their grief, their anger, their hopes, their fears. Diane can see that weight in the set of Atlas' shoulders, can hear it in his voice.

“I am not a liberator,” he says. “Liberators do not exist. These people will liberate themselves.”

Fourteen words, and the axis of Diane’s world shifts.

The heaviness passes as quickly as it came. Atlas moves on to logistics, to plans and her part in them. When a man comes in halfway through with a paper in his hand and a scowl on his face, Atlas waves him away. The cornerstone of the revolution, the most important person in Apollo Square, and still he makes time for Diane. (If that thought stirs something bitter in her, she lets it lie. Some things are better off buried.)

“I don’t want you fightin' for us, Miss McClintock,” says Atlas as she stands to leave, and the bottom drops out from her world. A split second before she can object, he continues: “Fight with us.”

Diane meets his gaze without wavering, and she swears, “I will.”

For the first time since she walked through the door, Atlas smiles.

* * *

Every round of ammunition is precious in Apollo Square. Not nearly as precious as ADAM, but precious enough that people have died getting it from outside the wire. Guns are easy; it’s the bullets that matter. Some use them as currency. A dozen rounds for a drop of ADAM, for a scrap of ever-scarcer food. (Diane catches herself longing for the old days of dinners at Rapture’s finest restaurants, and shame coils in her stomach to match the gnawing hunger.) Fights break out over rations more and more, but Atlas is there with a sharp word and a strong hand. And, when need be, a gun of his own.

For a girl from a family full of soldiers, Diane doesn’t take quickly to learning to shoot. A needle is second nature; her mama put one her hand from the time she was a little girl. But she was never allowed near the locked box in the closet with her father’s rifle inside. What would a future housewife ever need with a gun?

More than her mama could have expected, as it turns out.

A hand covers Diane’s, correcting her grip, shifting her fingers into place. Hold the pistol with two hands, right high on the grip, left lower. Not so tightly, Miss McClintock. Don’t lock your arms. Steady now. Fire.

A closer miss than before, but still a miss.

She knows what her brother would say, if he were by her side and not in a battlefield graveyard: _Keep your head up, Dee._ Graham would look down at her from his towering height, tap the bottom of her chin like he did when they were little. _Keep your head up._ Diane takes a breath, steadies her aching arms, and tries again.

She hits the target. Once, twice, three times.

Her first raid goes smoother than she could have expected. There’s less security at the wire these days, with both sides wearing thin. The raid doesn’t catch any Little Sisters or Big Daddies, but they get buckshot and grenades and a crossbow with bolts. Best of all, they take down two of Ryan’s men in exchange for none of their own. Atlas smiles when they come back— thin, worn around the edges, but a smile all the same.

The next raid is less successful.

Diane looks back at Sam Boyle’s body once, just once, and keeps running. Two dead soldiers are no more use than one.

Long before Diane left the surface, back when she still lived with her mama, the military knocked on their door twice in one week. _I have been asked to inform you that your son,_ was as far as the first visitor got before Mama started screaming. The second visitor, though. Mama did nothing but stare at him with numb graveyard-silence, even after he left and Diane shut the door behind him.

After she makes it back behind the safety of the wire, Diane delivers the news to Boyle’s brother. He doesn’t make a sound.

* * *

This is what happens when a raiding party takes down a Big Daddy: someone slings the Little Sister over their shoulder like a ragdoll as she cries and sobs and screams for Mr. Bubbles to wake up, wake up, please, wake up. The little girl pounds her fists against the chest of her captor, kicks her bare feet against their back with all her might. Sometimes her hair catches on the barbed wire; sometimes it doesn’t. None of it stops her from being dragged back to the fence.

(Diane always wanted to be a mother. The Little Sisters make her glad she never was.)

Someone with a stronger stomach than Diane gets the ADAM only way they can. A door shuts; a minute passes; the crying stops. They’re left with enough ADAM to get through the next few weeks and a broken little body with a hole where her stomach should be.

Everyone cheers when a Little Sister is captured, but when the fire starts, Hestia Chambers is as quiet as an empty church.

“She didn’t remember me.”

Tovah Landau is staring into the fire, at the burning shape that used to be her daughter. She’s been that way for an hour, talking in halts and jerks over the crackle of the flames. The Little Sisters aren’t children anymore, Atlas says, and because he says it, everyone says it. The Sisters are nothing more than Ryan’s monsters. If Atlas is wrong— If they’re anything more than that—

Then there’s nothing left but to wait for Rapture to fall into the sea.

But Diane can’t let herself doubt like that. Not while Tovah is looking into the flames like the fire is the only thing in the world. These are her people now: hers to fight beside, hers to comfort. Her hand stays, anchoring, on Tovah’s shoulder. Tovah covers Diane’s hand with her own and squeezes like it’s the neck of the man who took Hanna away from her. They’re barely two feet from the flames, but Diane feels cold all the way through.

She’s tried telling Tovah that she doesn’t have to be here, doesn’t have to do this to herself. It’s no use.

“I called her name,” Tovah says to the fire, her voice toneless. “She didn’t answer. She looked right through me. And her eyes… What did they turn her into?”

They both know the answer. Diane says nothing.

“They took her so fast, I didn’t have time to blink. I was getting that day’s Tribune— December 10th. There was a story about that big tennis match. I thought Hanna was just being quiet, but when I turned around, she...” Tovah’s hand slips off Diane’s, falls limply to her side. “Why didn’t I stop it?” Her voice catches on the last word. It’s the first sign of anything but emptiness since the fire was lit.

Diane remembers Elise Tobet walking into the fire weeks ago, not saying a word, not screaming until the very end. She tightens her grip on Tovah’s shoulder. “There was nothing you could do. It wasn’t your—”

“I took my eyes off her!” Tovah wrenches her shoulder out of Diane’s grip, finally turning to look at her. Her pupils are blown wide; the light of the flame turns her brown eyes to gold. “I was her mother, and I took my eyes off her for a second, and I let them take her!” She sinks to the floor, hugging her knees to her chest, one side of her pale face illuminated by the fire. Her shoulders tremble; her breath comes in quick, short gasps. “I let them take my baby, Diane. I let them take my baby.”

Diane kneels on the cold ground to put her arms around Tovah. Inside the embrace, Tovah falls apart, choking on apologies that are more sobs than words. “I’m sorry, it should’ve been me, it’s my fault, I’m sorry, I’m—”

Diane doesn’t know how long they stay like that. She murmurs gentle reassurances, and she lets Tovah cry into her shoulder until the apologies stop pouring out, and she doesn’t let go. Eventually, the tears turn into stories. Stories about a Hanna who liked puzzles, a Hanna who thought a tree was a monster the first time she saw one, a Hanna who snuck into Arcadia once and scared her mother half to death. A Hanna who Ryan’s scientists killed long before today’s raid. Diane listens until the fire dies and Tovah’s words die with it.

They both rise on shaky legs. Back to their duties, back to the revolution, back to a fight neither of them asked for.

They didn’t start this war, but by God, they’ll end it.


End file.
